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WEDNESDAY, Dec. 18, 2013 — Yesterday, a Taiwanese tourist in Australia who can’t swim walked over the edge of a pier, falling into deep water. The cause of her treacherous fall? Facebook. The woman was fine, and was even able to keep her phone in her hand the entire time she floated in the water awaiting rescue.

Stories like this reinforce the conclusion that as a society, we’re addicted to social media. It’s not even social media alone, according to several recent articles and quizzes designed to explain the addicting nature of the networking site. Dating and relationship coach David Wygant goes one step further with a blog post on the Huffington Post: “Is Twitter and Facebook the End of Society?” (Spoiler alert: he thinks it is.)

But a new study from Missouri University of Science and Technology and Duke University presented at the IEEE Internation Conference in India yesterday, suggests that social media may not be to blame for the phenomenon of Internet addiction. Furthermore, the study states, there haven’t been enough comprehensive studies to even establish what normal Internet usage is, which makes it much more difficult to understand what addictive behavior is.

“What I am most surprised by is the fact that there have not been tons of attempts made to establish norms,” said study author Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. It impossible to talk about Internet addiction without establishing norms, which is what this study tried to do.

"Before this study, I would have said no one's measured real Internet use," said Benjamin Silverman, MD, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

The researchers selected 69 computer science majors at Missouri University of Science and Technology to observe over a two-month period. Contrary to most studies where people are asked what sites they spend time on, the researchers directly monitored the student’s Internet use. They wrote that they believe the method is “the first study to use real Internet data that is collected continuously, passively and preserving privacy.”

“If you don’t track use, and just rely on people’s memory of how they’ve been using the Internet, it may not be reliable,” Doraiswamy said. Beyond people’s natural tendency to minimize bad habits and exaggerate the good ones, people often flip between tabs so frequently they may not even know how they’re spending most of their time online.

The researchers found that out of the 69 participants, nine individuals showed the tendency toward Internet addiction, meaning that they had cravings and withdrawal symptoms, and it negatively affected their lives by disrupting sleep or causing anxiety. However, these heavy users were seen to use Facebook and Twitter much less than the normal users, the researchers noted. Instead, heavy Internet users spent more time on activities such as web browsing, instant messenger, and email. The study was small, and the results were not statistically significant, but it is a first indication of how findings might change as people start to directly monitor what people do online, rather than rely on self-reporting.

“I think we have that tendency to attribute problems to anything new,” Doraiswamy said about why the media tends to get the bulk of the blame. He noted that when stereos were first put in cars, people complained everyone would have accidents, but that fear dissipated.

The one issue with the conclusion is that the researchers tracked Internet use on computers, and it's possible people check social media more frequently on their mobile devices, Silverman said. He added, though, that in his experience working with people with internet addiction, "the people who really get sucked in it's often doing other things, like playing video games or gambling."

Silverman theorized that this may be because social media is firmly grounded in reality, and that for many people, the addiction stems from a desire to escape, and so gaming or other similar activities is better for self-medication, he said.

Internet addiction is perhaps more difficult to give up than other addictions, such as alcohol or drugs, Doraiswamy noted. That’s because it’s impossible to escape technology and the Internet, he said. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) added Internet Gaming Disorder in the most recent DSM-5 as a condition to watch, arguing it warrants more investigation.

Doraiswamy advised people to take occasional breaks from their online lives to make sure they could handle it. If you can’t take a break, it may be the first sign of a problem. Silverman said he often asks he patients to answer the simple question of whether the habit is working in their life, or if it's become problematic.

Establishing what a normal amount of healthy Internet usage might be is still essential, Doraiswamy said.

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